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Sunlight reflection confirms presence of liquid on Saturn”s moon Titan

May 6, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

Washington, May 6 (ANI): NASA”s Cassini Spacecraft has captured a glint of light reflecting from the surface of Saturn”s moon Titan, which confirms the presence of a lake filled with liquid.

The discovery makes Titan the only place besides Earth known to have a body of liquid on its surface.

Stephan et al. report the first detection of a directly visible glint, also called a specular reflection, which occurs when sunlight reflects off a smooth, mirror-like liquid surface.

NASA”s Cassini Spacecraft captured an image of the glint on 8 July 2009, and the researchers determined that it came from Kraken Mare, a large, lake-shaped basin near Titan”s north pole.

Until recently the northern polar regions of Titan had been in winter darkness since Cassini”s arrival in 2004; the recent direct illumination by sunlight made it possible to observe these optical reflections for the first time. (ANI)

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Scientists unravel chemistry of Titan’s hazy atmosphere

September 17, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 16 (ANI): In a new research, a team of scientists has unraveled the chemical evolution of the orange-brownish colored atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, the only solar system body besides Venus and Earth with a solid surface and thick atmosphere.

Scientists at University of Hawai’i at Manoa carried out the research.

The UH Manoa team, including Xibin Gu and Seol Kim, conducted simulation experiments mimicking the chemical reactions in Titan’s atmosphere utilizing crossed molecular beams in which the consequence of a single collision between molecules can be followed.

The team’s experiments indicate that triacetylene can be formed by a single collision of a “radical” ethynyl molecule and a diacetylene molecule.

An ethynyl radical is produced in Titan’s atmosphere by the photodissociation of acetylene by ultraviolet light.

Photodissociation is a process in which a chemical compound is broken down by photons.

“Surprisingly, the photochemical models show inconsistent mechanisms for the production of polyynes,” said Kaiser, who is the principal investigator of this study.

The mechanism involved in the formation of triacetylene, was also confirmed by accompanying theoretical calculations by Alexander Mebel, a theoretical chemist at Florida International University.

These theoretical computations also provide the 3D distribution of electrons in atoms and thus the overall energy level of a molecule.

To apply these findings to the real atmosphere of Titan, Danie Liang and Yuk Yung, planetary scientists at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica and California Institute of Technology (Caltech), respectively, performed photochemical modeling studies of Titan’s atmosphere.

All data together suggest that triacetylene may serve as a building block to form more complex and longer polyynes and produce potential precursors for the aerosol-based layers of haze surrounding Titan.

The study demonstrated for the first time that a sensible combination of laboratory simulation experiments with theory and modeling studies can shed light on decade old unsolved problems crucial to understand the origin and chemical evolution of the solar system.

The researchers hope to unravel next the mystery of the missing ethane lakes on Titan – postulated to exist for half a century, but not detected conclusively within the framework of the Cassini-Huygens mission.

In the future, the UH Manoa team will combine the research results with terrestrial-based observations of Titan’s atmosphere. (ANI)

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Largest lake on Saturn’s moon Titan found to be as smooth as a mirror

August 22, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, August 22 (ANI): A new study has shown that the largest lake on Saturn’s moon Titan is as smooth as a mirror, varying in height by less than 3 millimeters, and good enough for skipping rocks on it.

According to a report in New Scientist, the find, based on new radar observations, adds to a deluge of evidence that the moon’s lakes are indeed filled with liquid, rather than dried mud.

“Unless you actually poured concrete and spread it really, really smoothly, you’d never see something like that on Earth,” said team member Howard Zebker of Stanford University.

Astronomers have waffled on whether Saturn’s largest moon is dry or wet, but the bulk of the evidence points to liquid lakes.

The radar on the Cassini spacecraft, which arrived at Saturn in 2004, turned up dark splotches at Titan’s poles.

The darkness in radar indicates those regions are very smooth, like the signal expected from the surface of a liquid lake.

Spectral data also showed that the apparent lakes seem to be filled with methane and ethane, which would be liquid on Titan’s frigid surface, and “geomorphologically, they just look like lakes,” Zebker said.

But, previous radar observations viewed the apparent lakes at an angle, and therefore did not see bright radar glints reflected back from their surface, leaving open the possibility that the features were dry lake beds or patches of soot.

Now, researchers report seeing just that signal.

In December last year, Cassini pointed its radar straight down over Titan’s largest lake, Ontario Lacus, which spans 235 kilometres at the moon’s south pole.

The reflected signal was so strong, it maxed out the probe’s receiver.

The radar echoes revealed a surface covering thousands of square metres whose height varies by less than 3 millimetres – 10 times as flat as previous measurements were able to reveal.

“It’s very hard to imagine a solid surface that is smooth on the order of millimeters,” lead author Lauren Wye of Stanford told New Scientist.

This provides strong evidence that the lake is currently liquid, not dried mud.

“If you’ve ever walked outside and seen an area on the ground where there’s mud and the water dries up, even that is pretty flat – but you get cracks in the mud and pieces that curl up,” Zebker said. “You never see anything as smooth as what we’re inferring for Titan’s surface,” he added.

Confirming the presence of liquid on Titan adds to the long list of similarities between Titan and Earth. (ANI)

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Solar X-rays may create life on Saturn’s moon Titan

June 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, June 26 (ANI): A new laboratory study has suggested that blasting the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan with X-rays can produce DNA building blocks, a finding that adds to evidence that Titan may be ripe for life.

According to a report in New Scientist, researchers led by Sergio Pilling of the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil have produced adenine, one of five base components of DNA and RNA, in Titan-like conditions.

Instead of using UV light, however, they used low-energy, or “soft”, X-rays.

“Soft X-rays can penetrate deeper in Titan’s atmosphere and reach denser regions (than UV),” Pilling told New Scientist, adding that X-rays set off different chemical reactions in Titan’s atmosphere.

They modelled Titan’s current atmosphere using a mixture of nitrogen and methane gas, and added water to it to simulate the conditions when the moon is bombarded with water-bearing comets or asteroids – a situation that occurred much more frequently in the early solar system.

A frozen sheet of salty water ice lay below this ‘atmosphere’ and caused the gas to condense into liquid droplets, like dew settling onto Titan’s icy surface.

Then, the researchers bombarded the setup with X-rays for up to three days, representing the radiation that Titan would get from the sun over a period of about 7 million years.

Afterwards, the still-frozen surface contained some organic compounds, but nothing that could be called the building blocks of life.

But when they heated the samples to room temperature, adenine appeared.

That means Titan’s saucepan of proto-life would need a source of extra heat to activate.

If there was a warm period in Titan’s history, perhaps prompted by volcanic activity or meteoroid impacts, “a primitive life could have had a chance to flourish there,” according to the researchers.

Titan is due to be heated up in the next few billion years, when the sun bloats into a red giant star, expanding to the present orbit of Earth, they added.

According to Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA, if impacts sometimes allow water to exist on the moon’s surface, then things might happen.

“It is interesting to see how far the chemistry can go,” he said. (ANI)

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Titan’s squashed shape hints at vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface

April 3, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, April 3 (ANI): A new study has suggested that Saturn’s moon Titan is surprisingly non-spherical, and is squashed at its poles, suggesting it may hide vast reserves of liquid methane beneath its surface.

Titan is 5150 kilometers across, making it larger than Mercury and only slightly smaller than the largest moon in the solar system, Jupiter’s Ganymede.

According to a report in New Scientist, by bouncing radar signals off the moon’s smog-enshrouded surface, the Cassini spacecraft has now measured Titan’s shape precisely for the first time.

“What we have are the first actual measurements showing that Titan’s not an exact sphere – this distorted egg-shaped thing best fits the observed shape,” study leader Howard Zebker of Stanford University told New Scientist.

Compared to a perfect sphere, Titan is squashed at its poles, with the ground at the poles about 700 meters lower than at the equator.

Titan, which always shows the same face to Saturn, is also stretched out a little in the planet’s direction, so the elevation around the equator itself varies by about 400 meters.

Titan is more squashed than expected, which may be a sign that the moon was once closer to Saturn.

In a closer, faster orbit, Titan also would have spun faster, assuming it had one face locked on Saturn back then as it does today.

An orbit 23 percent closer than the one Titan occupies today would account for the extra squashing at the poles and bulging at the equator.

The lower elevation at the poles fits nicely with one proposed explanation for why Titan’s lakes of hydrocarbons – made of liquid ethane and possibly also liquid methane – are found only in the polar regions.

If Titan has vast stores of hydrocarbons beneath its surface, the lakes could simply be places where the ground lies low enough to expose some of this liquid.

This is similar to the way digging a well shaft on Earth will expose groundwater.

In this scenario, it makes sense that the lakes appear preferentially at the lower-lying poles, according to Stephen Clifford of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.

“There’s this potential for liquid to peek above the top of the solid body at the poles,” he said.

If Titan does conceal large reservoirs of methane and ethane beneath its icy surface, it could also explain why methane is so abundant in Titan’s atmosphere. (ANI)

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Slushy water on Titan may be proof of volcanism

March 30, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

London, March 30 (ANI): New radar images from NASA’s Cassini probe have suggested that slushy water from a hidden ocean may be pooling onto the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, thus bolstering the case for the existence of volcanoes on its surface.

Titan’s exterior, where the temperature is around -180 degree Celsius, is thought to be mostly water-ice, but it may be a different story deep down.

Variations in the moon’s rate of rotation suggest an ocean could lurk below.

An area of Titan called Hotei Arcus appears to fluctuate in brightness on timescales of several months, and in 2005, Robert Nelson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues, suggested this might be the result of “cryovolcanic” eruptions of water from below.

Others argued that the flickers were caused by the moon’s hazy atmosphere.

The cryovolcanism idea was bolstered in 2008, when observations of Hotei Arcus by a radar instrument aboard NASA’s Cassini probe revealed structures that resembled lava flows.

Some opponents of the idea still argued these might be deposits of sediment, carried by a flow of methane in the past.

Now, according to a report in New Scientist, radar images from Cassini have allowed scientists led by Randolph Kirk of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, to create a 3D view of the area.

It turns out that the sinuous structures tower 200 meters above their surroundings.

They say that this is consistent with the structures having formed when slushy water and ammonia squirted onto the surface and froze, but that they could not have been produced by a flood of liquid methane depositing sediment.

The structures may have formed when slushy water and ammonia squirted onto the surface and froze.

If slush volcanoes have been erupting recently, Titan would join a select group of solar system objects – Earth and Io – known to be volcanic at present.

As for life existing in the ocean below, Kirk said, “It’s conceivable life could be going on down there.” (ANI)

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Virtual maps provide bird’s-eye view of Titan’s Earth-like landscapes

March 25, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 25 (ANI): Scientists have made new virtual topographic maps of Saturn’s moon Titan, which provide a bird’s-eye view its Earth-like landscapes.

Cassini radar team member Randy Kirk with the Astrogeology Science Center at the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, created the maps.

He used some of the 20 or so areas where two or more overlapping radar measurements were obtained during 19 Titan flybys.

These stereo overlaps cover close to two percent of Titan’s surface.

The process of making topographic maps from them is just beginning, but the results already reveal some of the diversity of Titan’s geologic features.

The new flyover maps show, for the first time, the 3-D topography and height of the 1,200-meter (4,000-foot) mountain tops, the north polar lake country, the vast dunes more than 100 meters (300 feet) high that crisscross the moon, and the thick flows that may have oozed from possible ice volcanoes.

“These flyovers let you take in the bird’s-eye sweeping views of Titan, the next best thing to being there,” said Kirk.

“We’ve mapped many kinds of features, and some of them remind me of Earth. Big seas, small lakes, rivers, dry river channels, mountains and sand dunes with hills poking out of them, lava flows,” he added.

The maps show some features that may be volcanic flows. These flows meander across a shallow basin in the mountains.

One area suspected to be an ice volcano, Ganesa Macula, does not appear to be a volcanic dome. It may still have originated as a volcano, but it’s too soon to know for sure.

“It could be a volcanic feature, a crater, or something else that has just been heavily eroded,” said Kirk.

The stereo coverage includes a large portion of Titan’s north polar lakes of liquid ethane and methane. Based on these topographical models, scientists are better able to determine the depth of lakes.

The highest areas surrounding the lakes are some 1,200 meters (about 4,000 feet) above the shoreline.

By comparing terrain around Earth to the Titan lakes, scientists estimate their depth is likely about 100 meters (300 feet) or less.

More 3-D mapping of these lakes will help refine these depth estimates and determine the volume of liquid hydrocarbons that exist on Titan.

This information is important because these liquids evaporate and create Titan’s atmosphere. Understanding this methane cycle can provide clues to Titan’s weather and climate. (ANI)

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